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A story caught my eye recently about a 102 year old woman who has been maintaining her car for 63 years (http://on.today.com/QxM1xF). She regularly changes the oil and the spark plugs on her Packard Roadster which she bought in 1930. Obviously the most remarkable thing about the story is the longevity of this lady’s relationship with her car which is remarkable. I immediately thought if anyone today is beginning a relationship with their car which will last for as long as this. It may be possible with a vintage car and a simple engine, but the modern car engine is a mystery to all but trained mechanics. Even then these mechanics need a dedicated computer to hook up to the engine’s central management system to access diagnostics and get the car to tell them what needs maintaining. In terms of physically getting into the engine to actually do something like change a plug, the modern engine is a bewildering mass of pipes and wires and strange contraptions, and your set of standard spanners probably won’t work on many of the fixings. It took me 6 months to find the manual dipstick on my car’s engine and it’s not in the place where the manual says it should be. All of this means that car maintenance is now by default outsourced to a specialist garage. The days of the DIY car mechanic are largely gone.

This story is one of increasing complexity, and increasing complexity usually means decreasing access for most of us and a concentration of skill in fewer and fewer hands. This is by and large how the narrative of technology plays out. Take the back off a TV set from the 1970s and it was relatively easy to see with a little knowledge of electronics, where all the major parts were and what they did. You can’t even take the back off a modern TV set, and if you did you’d see a set of generic looking circuit boards with no clue as to what they did other than ‘make the TV produce a picture’. We are surrounded by black boxes, all doing amazing things but which we cannot see inside.

But there is perhaps one area of technology where this story of increasing complexity and specialisation does not apply. The internet, or more specifically the web. Publishing on the web used to be very difficult. You needed to know about HTML (and CSS if you wanted to make your pages look nice), you needed to know what a web server was and how to FTP files to it and if you wanted to do multimedia (even sounds let alone video), then you needed a trip to the bookshop to buy those 2000 page computer manuals. It was all pretty complex, even arcane, and this meant that specialists held the keys to the kingdom of web publishing.

That is all gone now, publishing to the web is now routine. In fact publishing to the web happens without most people knowing they are doing it. They can hit update status on Facebook, or leave a comment on linked-in or fire a few tweets out simply and easily. The technology of the web, the stuff under the bonnet (or in the back of the TV) has gone. Or rather very clever people have written code which have created the appearance of it disappearing so all of us can just get on and get posting.

The question is, what are you going to do with all of this freedom? Are you going to be able to build anything which rivals Margaret Dunning’s 60 year old friendship with her car? How best to use this amazing technology which has dropped straight out of the sky into our laps?

My new business cards were delivered (courtesy of Moo) today. It’s the first time I’ve had to design and order my own cards, previous jobs were with employers who got them made for me. Business cards are essential if you run a business, which is of course simply stating the blindingly obvious. But you imagine talking to someone, explaining what you did, and them asking for a card and your reply: ‘I’m sorry I don’t have any’. They would immediately assume you were either incompetent or not really in business at all, so unthinkable is it not to have a square card in your pocket with your name printed on.

Business cards are persisting well into the Internet era. Twitter, facebook, blogs like this are not killing them off. The simple action of being able to give someone a card to put in their pocket seems resistant to digital incursion. True there are apps for your smartphone which allow you transfer a digital business card onto a prospects phone, but my advice is to ignore these and go with the majority and get some cards printed. After all by the time you’ve fiddled with your app to get it to transfer your data, your contact will have either got bored, or somebody else with have come up to them and trumped you by handing an old school business card straight into their welcoming palm.

There is a final reason for having business cards, one related not to interfacing professionally with people you are looking to do business with, but rather to how you see yourself. Starting a new business is not easy, and doubts about whether you are doing the right thing, whether it is going to succeed, whether anyone ever will decide that they want to pay you some money for doing something will flit through your head on a regular basis. Getting a business card is a small step towards combatting these doubts. That small square of card is an inbuilt confidence boost, and rectangular reminder that your business is real, that you are doing the right thing and you are going to make a success of it.